16 Sep 2012

By Carly Page at Search Engine Watch:
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has heralded mobile as the key to
Facebook's future success during his first interview since the social
network's poor stock market debut.

Speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on
Tuesday, Zuckerberg openly admitted that the performance of his
company's stock had been disappointing, but promised that Facebook's
mobile performance would see the company bounce back.

A hoodie-less Zuckerberg said that the company wasted two years
relying on HTML5 instead of focusing on mobile app options, admitting,
"We burned two years not working on mobile."
"It is really clear from the stats and my own personal intuition that
a lot of energy in the ecosystem is going to mobile, not desktop,"
Zuckerberg said. "Now we are a mobile company and all the code is being
written in mobile, on mobile we are going to make a lot more money than
on desktop."
"That is the future," he added, "We are going to be doing killer stuff there."
That doesn't mean that Facebook will be releasing its own mobile
phone any time soon though, as Zuckerberg went on to slam rumors that
the firm was plotting to enter the hardware business.
"It's a juicy thing to say we're building a phone, which is why
people want to write about it. But it's so clearly the wrong strategy
for us," he said.

The topic of Facebook search also made headlines. Zuckerberg noted
Facebook is seeing about a billion search queries per day and "we're not
even trying."
“Search engines are really evolving toward giving you a set of
answers,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s not just like ‘I’ll type in something
and show me some relevant stuff.’ It’s, ‘I have a specific question,
answer this question for me.’
"When you look at it from that perspective, Facebook is pretty
uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have: ‘What sushi
restaurants have my friends gone to in New York in the past six months
and liked?’ ‘Which of my friends and friends of friends work at this
company I’m interested in … so I can talk to them about what it’s like
to work there?’
"These are queries you could potentially do in Facebook if we built
out the system that you couldn’t do anywhere else. And at some point
we’ll do it…. That’s one obvious thing that would be interesting for us
to do in the future.”